On Thursday, Sarah Glover, the former president of the National Association for Black Journalists, said “the time has come for all news media to capitalize the B in Black” in an open letter calling on The Associated Press to update its style guide.
“This book is the bible for working journalists and sets journalistic industry standards,” she wrote. “The AP has tremendous impact as a wire service with more than 1,000 subscribers worldwide.”
Los Angeles Times journalist Erin B. Logan made the announcement that their newsroom was making the change on Tuesday, referring to a memo sent from the paper’s executive editor Norman Pearlstine. “The conversation taking place at The Los Angeles Times and across the country reflects a necessary and long overdue shift in thinking about racism,” he wrote. “Without exception The Times is opposed to racism.”
On Tuesday, Poynter reported that BuzzFeed News has also adopted the practice. On Friday, Erik Wemple, who reports on media for The Washington Post, tweeted that NBC News and MSNBC would also make the change.
“This step is a good first step to affirm the significance of being Black in America,” Glover wrote in her open letter. “This matters. It’s to bring humanity to a group of people who have experienced forms of oppression and discrimination since they first came to the United States 401 years ago as enslaved people. I ask for this change in honor of the Black Press, which already capitalizes the ‘B’ in Black, and in honor of the legacy of the 44 brave men and women who founded the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in 1975.”
Scene previously had no formal policy of using the capital-B, but has informally adopted it in the past year. It will now be added to our style guide.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2020.
I’m o.k. with this, as long as they also capitalize the letter Y in Yellow, the letter B in brown, the letter R in Red and the letter W in white when referring to Asian-Americans, Hispanic and Latino-American, Native American Indians, and White Americans.
I thought spelling and punctuation was a thing of the past.
What’s important is…bible has a lowercase b.
Another exciting and yet useless gesture that will do absolutely nothing do help end black on black violence.
On average, every three days in Cleveland alone, a black life is ended at the hands of another black.
Sorry, I’m all for ending biased policing and getting officers with no self control out of law enforcement positions but I just cant get jacked up about this.
When will this much much bigger problem that the black community faces be addressed or even acknowledged?
Oh you mean a bunch of leftist publications are all working in lockstep to shape the public opinion. You don’t say. I can’t believe it.
Even black people are getting sick of this condescending pandering from the left. Some of them even recognize that these leftists are using them and race to advance their communist ideology.
“Not Today Karen” read the sign
Why? ‘because its Mohisa day!
Yes, the day where we (loudly) blame everything wrong in our lives on everyone else and take zero personal responsibility for the repeated dumb life decisions we have made?
See, I really think if your average white American female can be stereotyped, why not your average black female ?
I mean fair is fair right? we just want everything equal right?
Why do the media just assume that all these protestors are African-American? How do they know that some aren’t African-Canadian?
FAKE NEWS!!!